See some of the rarest books from NYC’s Antiquarian Book Fair
This weekend, more than 200 book vendors from all over the world are descending upon the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, bound by a love of printed matter and vintage ephemera. New York’s International Antiquarian Book Fair—now in its 60th year—is a veritable mecca for rare books and documents, maps and manuscripts, posters, prints, and pamphlets, and more.
Some items, like a large-scale, completely intact map of Rome, stretch back to the mid-18th century, while others are more modern: Take a retro first edition of Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V, for example. Though fascinating historical texts abound (Parisian documents detailing a sunken slave ship off the coast of Madagascar, an experimental Dadaist publication from 1920, advanced galley proofs of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, new wave, underground fashion magazines from the 1980s), along with iconic cultural objects (Greta Garbo’s apartment keys, a rare 32-foot-long Chinese scroll—one of only 50 ever made—designed by artist Joan Miro, the original illustration for De La Soul’s Three Feet High album cover), we identified some of the rarest items. Check them out in photographs by Fast Company‘s staff photographer Celine Grouard.
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